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Some Nice Results

Some Nice Results

By Astiles on November 10, 2008

At long last, the world can breathe easy, knowing after heated debate, and after serious discussion and consideration both of services already rendered and of things that may come in the future, the voters have had their say. Regardless of what we were expecting or hoping for, there is some sense of relief for at last knowing the answer.

I'm talking, of course, about the selection of the annual recipients of the "Most Important Contributions to Lunar Science & Exploration" awards presented at the recent big lunar conference in Florida.

What, were you expecting something else?

Between the three groups that ran that conference, plus the Young Lunar Explorers (Who ran an associated pre-conference and collaborated on the body of the main conference), seven awards were handed. I'm very proud to announce that the Google Lunar X PRIZE had a great night, taking home three of the seven.

I'm grateful to the International Lunar Exploration Working Group for selecting the Google Lunar X PRIZE to take home top honors in the "Commercial" and "Outreach" categories, as well as to the Lunar Explorers for awarding us the Young Lunar Explorers Award. It was a great honor to accept this award on behalf of the X PRIZE Foundation, Google, and all of our teams and partners. I'd also like to congratulate the other winners, including the Kaguya, Chandrayaan-1, LRO, and LCROSS mission teams.

As I told the audience at the conference's banquet, I'm hoping that our teams will be receiving the awards directly in the coming years--and hopefully for a long time to come!

Today, we announce that after close consultation with our teams over the last few months, that there will not be a launch attempt by our March 31st, 2018 deadline, and the grand prize of the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE will go unclaimed.

While we are disappointed at the result, XPRIZE is exploring a number of ways to proceed from here, and we are proud of the impact that the Google Lunar XPRIZE has achieved to date. Stay tuned for exciting updates in the near future.